Dennis C. Rasmussen Brown University Contemporary Political Theory as an Anti-Enlightenment Project [NB: I am aware that the argument of this paper – that the majority of contemporary political theorists seek to dissociate themselves from the Enlightenment – isn’t actually much of an argument. I am currently beginning a book project that will seek to defend the Enlightenment (to some extent or another) from the attacks of its contemporary critics; the material gathered here includes part of the introduction and the introductions to each of the five substantive chapters, along with a few underdeveloped remarks at the beginning and end that seek to tie things together. In other words, this material wasn’t written as a stand-alone paper, so I apologize if it seems incomplete – it is! I also apologize for the length; for those who don’t have the time or desire to read it all, the main line of argument comes in the first 18 pages, with the rest fleshing out some details. I will, however, be eager to hear your thoughts about the charges I have outlined, and especially if I have missed any major critics or criticisms of the Enlightenment.] Like it or not, we are all children of the Enlightenment, utterly incapable of escaping the clutches of ideals and arguments put forth over two centuries ago. Or so, at least, many critics of the Enlightenment seem to believe. Michel Foucault claims, for instance, that the Enlightenment has largely determined “what we are, what we think, and what we do today,”1 and John Gray insists that “all schools of contemporary political thought are variations on the Enlightenment project.”2 There is, of course, something to such claims: given the number of values, practices, and institutions that we have inherited from the eighteenth century, it is difficult to imagine what our world would look like without its Enlightenment heritage. Yet it is remarkable how few political theorists still defend this heritage; in fact, I can think of few topics on which recent work in political theory has displayed greater consensus than on the conviction that the Enlightenment outlook is radically problematic. This paper will seek to show that the bulk of contemporary political theory, so far from being a series of “variations on the Enlightenment project,” can in fact be better described as a series of criticisms of that project. I will begin with a broad survey of the critics of the Enlightenment since World War II and then discuss in more detail what I take to be the five main criticisms leveled against the Enlightenment today: its belief in universal foundations, its overconfidence in reason, its enabling of oppression, its hostility to “the other,” 1 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, trans. Catherine Porter, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 303. 2 John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995), viii; see also John Gray, Voltaire (New York: Routledge, 1999), 48. and its atomizing individualism. The Enlightenment’s Critics: An Overview The Enlightenment has been condemned almost since the moment of its inception. The earliest attacks came from the conservative and religious right (especially in Catholic France),3 although the most formidable of the Enlightenment‟s eighteenth-century opponents was surely Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great critic of the arts and sciences, luxury and refinement, self- interest and cosmopolitanism.4 The initial wave of hostility toward the Enlightenment peaked in the wake of the French Revolution and the Terror, with figures such as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and J. G. Herder leading the charge in blaming the philosophes for their supposed radicalism, atheism, and absolutism. This hostility diminished somewhat in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as movements such as Romanticism, Idealism, utilitarianism, and historicism replaced the Enlightenment as the main focal point of theoretical concern, although thinkers from G. W. F. Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche (at least in his “later period”) did take care to register their disagreements.5 Since World War II, however, opposition to the Enlightenment has surfaced with renewed vigor and from nearly every direction, uniting conservatives and liberals, pluralists and communitarians, postmodernists and religious fundamentalists; it is this more recent opposition to the Enlightenment with which I will be concerned in this paper. The rise and growth of contemporary opposition to the Enlightenment began when several scholars writing in the mid-twentieth century accused it of being the main cause of the most momentous problem the world was then facing: the emergence of totalitarianism. Perhaps the best-known such accusation came in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno‟s magnum opus, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Writing in the midst of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust (although from the safe refuge of California), Horkheimer and Adorno sought to explain “why 3 See Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4 See Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Arthur Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity” American Political Science Review 90.2 (1996): 344-60; and Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming 2008), chapter 1. 5 For a helpful survey of the opponents of the Enlightenment since eighteenth century, see Graeme Garrard, Counter- Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2 humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism,” and they found their culprit in the Enlightenment and “enlightenment thinking” more generally.6 The Enlightenment‟s “instrumental reason” inculcates an overwhelming concern for efficiency and gives people enormous power while at the same time undermining any objective basis for morality, they argue, and the ultimate result has been the death camps of the Third Reich. When Horkheimer and Adorno baldly state that “Enlightenment is totalitarian,”7 then, they mean that it leads (indirectly but inevitably) to fascism – an argument that has been repeated, in various forms, by a number of scholars since their time.8 Soon after the war ended, a number of Cold War liberals began to lay totalitarianism of the opposite kind at the Enlightenment‟s feet, blaming it for engendering not fascism but communism. Jacob Talmon, for instance, contended that the philosophes‟ rationalism led them to believe in the existence of a perfect, comprehensive, natural order in the world, and to see temporary coercion as justified for the sake of the harmonious, democratic, and free future that they believed would emerge once that order was realized.9 He argues that the Enlightenment gave birth to “totalitarian democracy,” the belief that true freedom can only be attained through collectivism and the extension of politics into every sphere of life – an outlook that he claims has been shared by all totalitarianisms of the left, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks. An even better-known argument along these lines was put forward by Isaiah Berlin, who contended that while the thinkers of the Enlightenment were supporters of freedom and opponents of intolerance in their own time, their rationalistic outlook ultimately led to terrible oppression. According to Berlin, the Enlightenment was “monist,” meaning that its proponents believed that the world and everything in it forms a systematic, coherent whole and is subject to a set of universal and eternal laws that are knowable 6 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1947] 2002), xiv. 7 Ibid., 4; see also 18. 8 For a number of different arguments that the Enlightenment bears a major responsibility for fascism in general and/or Nazism in particular, see Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, [1968] 1990); George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chapter 7; and Lawrence Birken, Hitler as Philosophe: Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). 9 See Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, [1952] 1970), 1-4, 249-53. 3 by human beings.10 In his view, monism ineluctably leads to utopianism – the belief in and search for an ultimate solution to all human problems – and this is precisely what led to the Soviet gulags and other monstrosities of the twentieth century; in other words, Berlin sees totalitarianism as implicit even if dormant in Enlightenment thought. Talmon and Berlin were two of the earliest prominent figures to link the Enlightenment with communism, but this link has now become widely accepted among contemporary scholars.11